SCOTUS Reinstates Obamacare Case–Will It Ever End?

26 Nov 2012

The Supreme Court has now reinstated a major challenge to Obamacare. Liberty University is challenging both the Individual Mandate and the Employer Mandate of the Affordable Care Act. (Of those two, the latter is even more damaging to the economy and job creation.) A liberal panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had thrown out the case last year, saying that the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) does not permit any federal court to rule on the merits of challenges to the Individual Mandate until that requirement goes into effect in 2014.

In its Jun. 28 opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius, the justices unanimously rejected this AIA argument. So Mat Staver, who is both dean of Liberty’s law school and chairman of the law firm representing the university, filed a petition for rehearing.

The Supreme Court granted that petition today. It has vacated (i.e., thrown out) the Fourth Circuit’s decision, and sent Liberty University v. Geithner back to the appellate court for new legal briefs and oral argument on the university’s claims.

So Obamacare is back in court, which is no surprise. Americans rightly push back against crushing governmental burdens, because we instinctively know that in our free country we wrote a federal Constitution for the express purpose of limiting the role of government in our daily lives. As long as Obamacare is on the books, headlines on these lawsuits will continue to fill our news pages.

Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is also on faculty at Liberty University School of Law.